Peter G. Kalivas doesn’t expect audiences to sit still during the upcoming performance of his The PGK Dance Project Too at the Malcolm X Library. In fact, movement is practically mandatory at this family-oriented dance show.

The free concert Tuesday offers contemporary dance works performed by the five-member apprentice company of the San Diego-based PGK Dance Project. But the centerpiece of the program is the “make a dance” segment. The dancers improvise to a short piece of music and Kalivas asks some audience members to choose their favorite moves. Those are arranged into a dance that’s accompanied by rhythmic rounds of vocals, clapping and body percussion sounds from the crowd.

“We make the entire audience choreographers in this moment,” says Kalivas, the company’s artistic director. “I’ve seen little kids so excited they will jump up and repeat the movements they saw. It’s really participatory; they become part of the performance.”

The PDK Dance Project Too

The goal of the library shows — the company has done two in Point Loma for younger children, and this is the first of three shows at Malcolm X — is to provide audiences with an up-close look at dance.

“We’re really interested in not just presenting dance to gain exposure but in explaining it,” says Alexis Weisbrod, the company’s managing director. “We live in a culture where oftentimes students, especially younger ones, may not have an opportunity to see live dance.”

To help familiarize audience members young and old with dance, Kalivas opens the one-hour show with a brief introduction. Before the start of each piece, he tells the audience what he had in mind while choreographing it, and then asks for audience feedback when it ends. Among the works presented are “Tagi Na,” the lively opener set to a fusion of classical Indian and contemporary music and performed by an all-female foursome of dancers, and the finale, which uses the Dave Matthews Band’s “Stay.”

The audiences aren’t the only ones learning. Kalivas says these shows are an excellent way for the young preprofessionals of The PGK Dance Project Too to remember why they’ve chosen this career path.

“They gain a brand-new appreciation for what they do,” he says. “When dancing on a stage, you never really see or touch the audience, but in the library, they are right in front of you. We’re often in a community room or a room with bright lights, and the dancers can see people’s responses.”

The library series is just one way The PGK Dance Project evangelizes for its art. In what he calls an “experiment” in audience development, Kalivas stages shows in nontraditional venues. Many people don’t feel at home in the theater, he says, so the company performs in art galleries, hair salons, restaurants and other businesses where “before people even enter they wonder how dance is going to happen in there, and that creates new excitement and new tension. You’ve already engaged them.”

He does this primarily through San Diego Dances, which is held at a different location every spring and fall. (The next show takes place March 15-16 at 3rdSpace in University Heights.) This is also his second year spearheading the Dance on the Edge program at the Mission Federal ArtWalk in Little Italy (April 27-28).

Kalivas hopes all these efforts, especially the library series, create an accessible, relatable experience for his audiences. He has traveled internationally as a performer (in addition to his career as a dancer, which he retired from last year, he’s also a musician and singer) and as a cultural ambassador for the State Department. He says he wants to serve the world by showing people anyone can dance. After the Point Loma library performances, Kalivas had parents approach him and say they wanted to start taking dance classes.

“We’re a professional dance company, but we don’t want to be aloof,” he says. “We’re doing a high level of dance, but it feels available. If just one person after a library performance says, ‘I want to do that,’ then that excites me.”